A system image shortly before a hard drive crash

[Strato Incendus]

So, as I said in the Lemmings World Tour development thread, my hard drive gave up the ghost today - and while I wasn't too worried about Lemmings World Tour anyway, because I basically make several safety copies on external drives and into Dropbox after every single level I create, I just made the convenient discovery that apparently, my external hard drive contains, apart from my manual safety copies, a complete system image of 285 GB in size with a "last change" date as late as yesterday.

That seems... oddly fortunate, because I didn't create that system image. In fact, I deleted an older system image file from my external hard drive earlier this year, to free up some space and only choose manually which files to store on it for safety.

Yet, the date of creation of that system image file is September 2015, and, as said before, the last change to it apparently took place yesterday.

Did my hard drive somehow figure out its days were coming to an end, and create that system image file by itself with its last breath?

Because contrary to the Mac I'm using for my recordings, I didn't use Time Machine or anything similar for my Windows Laptop. And I thought I had switched off Windows's option to automatically create system image backup files, simply because the external hard drive was too small to contain both the entire laptop's hard drive and everything I had stored on it on top of that (like my iTunes library).

Or so I thought, at least!

Now, I'm not going to count my chickens before they hatch; I'm not certain yet how much I can actually recover from that system image file, whether it is what I hope it to be, and plus, my new Windows system is going to be a partition on my Mac (which I'm currently writing from), so I'll have to set up the operating system first.

But still, this feels like quite a large and undeserved silver lining . Has anything similar happened to anyone of you yet?

[namida]

I did recover a few old interesting (though ultimately not particularly important) files that used to be in my Dropbox but I had long since deleted, when I fired up an old laptop that my Dropbox was synced to but I hadn't used in several years.